I am thinking aloud on the translation process of TMW.

Translation of client

Already being done. A few things to keep in mind for hackers:

• Keep sentences complete, while your clever solution at dynamically creating text strings may work in English, it will most likely not do that in other languages.
• Always include variables in the strings, they may need to be rearranged.
• Please include all kind of punctuation marks in the strings, different languages may use other marks.
• Do not include unnecessary spaces, tabs and similar blanks in the strings.
• Try to keep almost identical strings identical.

Translation of server

It might be preferable to keep translateable text minimal and instead put most of that in the client or data modules/repositories.

Translation of client/server data

Currently the client and server data are not translateable, and while many methods could be used to achieve it, gettext is preferred as that is the translation system already used elsewhere.

It seems there already is gettext support for Lua. For the Athena and magic scripts a custom gettext extraction tool probably is needed. There probably exists some scripts for XML and gettext somewhere already.

The scope

The following current data files could potentially be translated:

• XML scripts in tmwdata
  • emotes.xml (emote names)
  • hair.xml (hair colour names)
  • items.xml (item names, descriptions and effects)
  • monsters.xml (monster names)
  • skills.xml (skill names)
  • status-effects.xml (text messages)
  • units.xml (unit names)
• XML scripts in tmwserv-data
  • runes.xml (rune names)
• Lua scripts in tmwserv-data
  • scripts/*.lua (text messages et cetera)
• Athena scripts in tmw-eathena-data
  • npc/*.txt (text messages)
• Magic scripts in tmw-eathena-data
  • conf/magic.conf (text messages)
  • Possibly other conf/*.conf files, such as motd.conf

A few questions:

• Where are the element names defined?
• Add human readable versions of the spell names to magic.conf[.template]?

Similar approaches

Wesnoth has used a similar approach for their own mark-up language (WML), see for instance:

• About wmlxgettext
• As a perl script
• As a python script

Translation of the web interface

The PHP files in the tmwweb module should be made translateable with gettext as well, see http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php for instance. Currently a non-gettext solution is used, which does not scale very well.